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A question about All Grain brewing.
I am studying up on AG. I will be brewing my first AG next week. IN the comp joy of HB 3. C.P. shows a chart on pages 286, 287, that shows some guildlines for step mashing. Under the evaporation colum, the amount of water evaporated increases with the amount of grain used. My question is: Is this a naturally occuring thing, or do I continue boiling the wort until I achieve this amount? I understand the necesity for the extra water, primarally in the sparging area. I just don't know why if using 8lbs of grain, I will only evaporate .5 gal. whereas of I use 10lbs of grain, I will evaporate 1.75 gal. could someone help clairfy this to me?
I don't know if this is actually all due to evaporation. As the grain soaks up quite a bit of water itself, the more grain you add the more water you loose to absorption. You may experience a bit more evaporation from the fact that when you have more water and more grain mass, it takes longer to get everything up to temp. You should keep in mind that a lot of these evaporation charts and such are very system specific, so you will have to experiment a bit to see how things actually go.
As a suggestion, you may consider skipping the stepped mash for a bit. I have been doing all grain for quite a while now, and I only do a single infusion type mash. Everything works out great, and it is a bit more simple. You can always add more steps later if you wish. I personally use a 48 qt cooler to mash in. I add the grain to the cooler, heat my water to about 170 - 180 and add it to the grain. This usually gets me a mash temp right around 152 - 154. Mashing between 150 and 154 gets a good balance of fermentable and non-fermentable sugars out of the grain. Since the cooler is insulated well, I just close the lid, check the temp very occasionally and generally only loose about 1 to 2 degrees over an hour mash. It is a pretty simple process and has produced good results.
If you are going to be applying direct heat to your mash, you need to be careful that you don't scorch it.
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